Google Cloud Platform Results

Helped expand an initiative to break down barriers and create an inclusive environment for sick children

Helping ease the often traumatic hospital journeys of sick children and their families is Juiced TV founder Pip Russell’s mission. A former children’s television presenter, writer and producer at commercial broadcaster Network Ten, Russell saw an opportunity to involve sick children and their siblings in weekly, 25-minute programs broadcast throughout hospitals – starting with the Lady Cilento Children’s Hospital in Brisbane.

“I developed the concept of Juiced TV through my involvement with the Children’s Hospital Foundation when I was in my early twenties at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Brisbane,” she says. “Through organising some party days and events at the hospital, I saw an opportunity to capture what was going on and share the positivity through the wards to children who weren’t able to come because they were in isolation or too ill. “Juiced TV is about capturing patient stories and sharing them to reduce the alienation children feel during their hospital journeys.”

Using GCP has delivered the availability and performance for Juiced TV’s mobile app to be embraced by sick children and their families, and hospital stakeholders such as clinicians and administrators.

“Beyond a presence in every hospital in the country, I would also love to see the program extend to schools because most of the content we are creating and delivering through channels such as the app running on GCP is educational and entertaining. It is breaking down a lot of barriers and creating a more inclusive community for children who have chronic illnesses, injuries and other medical conditions.”

—Pip Russell, Managing Director, Juiced TV

Russell left her position at Network Ten and launched Juiced TV in 2015. The venture organises days of ‘Hands-on Happiness’ that enable children of all ages and abilities to participate in filmed activities such as musical workshops and interactions with animals from Australia Zoo north of Brisbane, sports stars and celebrities. Juiced TV also helps children undertake activities outside hospital walls including visits to the ballet, international tennis tournaments and Cirque du Soleil.

With just four full-time employees and one part-time worker, Juiced TV relies heavily on in-kind support, volunteers and partners such as AginicX to provide support and expertise in areas such as technology.

The venture is winning wide acceptance within the hospital and from patients. The program regularly receives positive feedback from several quarters. On one occasion, a mother said her amputee son had grown more confident from his experience with Juiced TV and had become a role model for other children. Furthermore, hospital staff had relished the opportunity that Juiced TV presented to relate to patients in ways other than administering injections or checking statistics.

By early August 2017, Juiced TV had organised more than 80 experiences outside hospital walls and broadcast more than 130 episodes of programming. Over 1,800 patients and their families had taken part in Juiced TV activities.

Russell’s ambitions extended beyond broadcasting Juiced TV through the high-grade entertainment system at the Lady Cilento Children’s Hospital. However, many of the Queensland regional hospitals she was targeting did not have the same facilities – such as patient entertainment systems – as the metro hospitals. While Juiced TV had been making its episodes available through a YouTube channel that had recorded more than 1.9 million views by early August 2017, Russell wanted to provide a viewing experience optimised for devices such as tablets in regional hospitals.

“We decided to build an application that would make Juiced TV episodes available to children and their families in hospitals across Queensland,” she says.

After raising funds for the project at a Xavier Foundation charity dinner in late 2016, Juiced TV worked with AginicX to build the application. The technology consultancy worked closely with the Juiced TV team to build awareness among stakeholders such as sponsors and hospital administrators of what the venture was trying to achieve. AginicX then worked with Google’s technical experts to help Juiced TV develop and launch the application.

Delivering a high-performance and low-administration load

AginicX and Juiced TV needed to select a platform to run the application that could meet the venture’s business and technical requirements. These needs included ensuring the application was accessible to children, their families, hospital employees and other stakeholders when they wanted to view episodes, with minimal impact on staff and resources in regional areas. The episodes themselves had to be viewable without impediments such as buffering, dropouts or poor quality. Furthermore, the platform itself had to be easy to administer to enable Juiced TV to focus on its core activity of creating vibrant, engaging content for sick children.

GCP ‘the perfect platform’

“AginicX recommended Google Cloud Platform as the perfect platform on which to upload content securely into the cloud and push it out to tablets used by children in regional hospitals,” Russell says.

The Juiced TV application is running on an architecture that comprises Google Kubernetes Engine to provide rapid application development and iteration; Google Cloud SQL to manage playlist and episode data; Google Cloud Storage to store Juiced TV episodes for later upload to devices and Google Stackdriver to undertake monitoring and logging.

The encapsulation of all cloud resources into a specific project with its own billing account made it very easy to offer a fully managed, isolated solution.

“AginicX recommended Google Cloud Platform as the perfect platform on which to upload content securely into the cloud and push it out to tablets used by children in regional hospitals.”

—Pip Russell, Managing Director, Juiced TV

Google has also provided $US5,000 in credits to help the venture run the mobile application on GCP during a key stage in its development.

With the application running smoothly in GCP, Juiced TV aims to build on its existing library of content with its own productions and by allowing children to film their own content and send it in for inclusion within Juiced TV episodes. The children also have a new channel to provide feedback about what they would like to see in shows. Furthermore, Juiced TV is in the process of onboarding regional hospitals in Queensland with the tablets and the application.

In the longer term, Russell would like to see the application complement a Juiced TV operation at leading hospitals in each capital city in Australia. This way, we would be connecting sick children and their families across the country, and the production crews based at these hospitals would also be able to undertake road trips to regional hospitals to create content with children there.

“Beyond a presence in every hospital in the country, I would also love to see the program extend to schools because most of the content we are creating and delivering through channels such as the application running on GCP is educational and entertaining. It is breaking down a lot of barriers and creating a more inclusive community for children who have chronic illnesses, injuries and other medical conditions.”

About Juiced TV

Based at Lady Cilento Children’s Hospital in Brisbane, Juiced TV provides entertainment and content that aims to improve the hospital journey for sick children and their families.

Industries:Media & Entertainment

Location: Australia

About AginicX

AginicX is a studio that specialises in the rapid development of accessible tools to automate inefficient or manual business processes.